Educational technology and the enclosure of academic labour inside public higher education. Richard Hall

Richard Hall
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Educational technology and the enclosure of academic labour inside public higher
education
Richard Hall
De Montfort University, England
Abstract
Across higher education in the United Kingdom, the procurement and deployment of
educational technology increasingly impacts the practices of academic labour, in
terms of administration, teaching and research. Moreover the relationships between
academic labour and educational technology are increasingly framed inside the
practices of neoliberal, transnational activist networks, which are re-defining UK
higher education as a new model public service. This paper highlights the
mechanisms through which educational technologies are used to control, enclose and
commodify academic labour. At issue is whether academics and academic staff
developers have a critical or ethical lens through which to critique the nature of the
technologies that they use and re-purpose inside the University, and whether such a
critique might enable technologies to be deployed for the production of socially-useful
knowledge, or knowing, beyond monetization in the knowledge economy.
Keywords: academic labour; educational technology; higher education; technology;
university
Introduction
Educational technology is increasingly viewed as a site of struggle inside the University,
through which the relationships of power between academic management and an increasingly
immaterial, academic labour force are re-produced (Feenberg, 1999; Hall & Stahl, 2012;
Neary, 2012a).1
More broadly the deployment of educational technology has been critiqued
as a form of state-subsidised privatisation (Newfield, 2012) that in-turn underpins a narrative
through which the marketisation of education can be rooted (Beckton, 2012).This narrative
helps to amplify the changing conditions and practices of academic labour inside the
University (Morris & Stevenson, 2012).

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Such practices are impacted by the co-option of technology inside higher education (HE) to
support marketised solutions to societal problems, be they related to capitalist work and value
extraction (Fuchs, 2010) or socio-environmental crises (Hall and Winn, 2011). This is
revealed through a technologically-determinist discourse that elevates efficiency gains,
increased productivity and value-for-money, inside the logic of economic growth (Hall, 2011;
Newfield, 2010). In the face of such a positivist discourse of educational technology, labour
inside the University is at risk of measurement, surveillance, and coercion, in order to meet
the marketised demands for profit-maximisation (Ball, 2012; Gove, 2012; Siemens, 2012).
As a result of the drive for constant innovation with its concomitant internal, treadmill
dynamic (Postone, 1996), technology forms a mechanism through which hegemonic positions
can be protected and developed inside education.
These hegemonic positions have been described as neoliberalism, the material practices of
which include enclosure, as a form of accumulation by dispossession, and commodification
(Harvey, 2005; Klein, 2007).2
Neoliberalism envelops education through competition
between providers, including private corporations, and the extraction of value from
previously socialised goods (Deem, Mok, & Lucas, 2008).3
In this increasingly marketised
space, technology is one mechanism through which relationships, revealed through actions,
emotions and affects, labour and services, are mined, closed-off and privatised, in order that
they can be monetised (Bonefeld, 2010; Tronti, 1973). Therefore, the procurement and
implementation of technology is a critical strand through which the interrelationships
between the dynamics of capitalist work and the realities of administration, teaching and
research as forms of academic labour can be revealed.
One theoretical standpoint that attempts to define potential counterpoints to neoliberalism
emerges from Autonomous Marxism,4
and underpins the work of scholarly collectives like
Edufactory and the Knowledge Liberation Front (Neary, 2012b; Thorburn, 2012). These
collectives operate in a more distributed form, with a focus on: working democratically
through general assemblies; practicing knowledge creation and critique in public, at the level
of the society into which the knowledge is to be put to work; and developing militant research
strategies that prioritise agency and power-to create the world. In the development of counter-
hegemonic positions, such collectives reveal the mechanisms through which academia is re-

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structured and its discourses enclosed, including the procurement and deployment of
technologies and techniques. Critically, in developing these positions, labour demonstrates
the potential to use technology for radically transformative praxis.
Thus, this paper focuses upon the United Kingdom’s higher education sector, in order to
argue that academics, alongside educational technologists and educational developers, might
usefully critique the mechanisms by which educational technologies are deployed at the heart
of the University in administration, teaching and research. Such a critique reveals how
technology is used to quicken the pace of privatisation of UK HE, and this applies both to the
idea of a publically-funded, governed and regulated HE institution, and to the sector as a
whole (Deem, Hillyard, & Reed, 2007; McGettigan, 2012; Neary, 2012a). Such a critique
also reshapes the deterministic, socio-economic discourses of efficiency, personalisation, and
networked individualism that underpin the technologically-mediated University. At issue is
whether academic collectives have a critical or ethical lens through which to critique the
nature of the technologies that they use and re-purpose inside the University, beyond a
limiting focus on enhancing the student experience? How might critical insight about the
ways in which educational technologies enable the enclosure of academic labour for value
formation and accumulation be catalysed? To what ends might such a critique be put?
Unravelling the relationship between educational technologies and academic labour
As Macbeth is consumed by guilt after the killing of King Duncan, Shakespeare (2007) has
Lady Macbeth tell her husband in Act 3 of the eponymous play, ‘Things without all remedy
Should be without regard: what’s done is done.’ Later in Act 5, as she in-turn becomes
haunted and has to regard those acts that have been done and for which there are deep and
very human consequences, Lady Macbeth laments that ‘What’s done cannot be undone’. The
play’s innate focus on the interrelationships between cognition, emotion and humanity, with
each relationship deepened and twisted through action and reflection, is a reminder of how
very personal and social acts close down or open up possibilities. Once something is done,
reality is re-set or renewed, until some new act of doing re-sets or renews it further. The idea
of doing and the ramifications of work that is done, as a deliberative action in the world that
is with regard, has implications both for academic labour as capitalist work and the role of
technology or technique in that work.

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For some Autonomist Marxists, doing is seen as a trans-historical alternative to capitalist
work (Holloway, 2002), and it might also be seen as a way of living and working beyond or
in excess of our alienated selves inside capitalism (Neary & Hagyard, 2011). This process of
doing and re-doing actions in the world does not have a corollary in undoing. It is not
possible to undo the reality of our actions or of our work in the world, and Lady Macbeth’s
cry of ‘what’s done cannot be undone’, and the realisation that acts, work or labour might
need to be regarded or reflected upon, is a reminder of the impact of consequence and the
need to find an ethical or critical surety in action based on a revelation of our entangled
realities. Inside the University, such a revelation of the ways in which the meaning of
academic labour is entangled or ravelled with technologies, techniques, organisational
structures and processes, and as a result how it enables the reproduction of capitalist social
relationships, might help academics to analyse the logic of their enclosure and act against it
(Roggero, 2011).
Thus, describing the actions or activities that are undertaken with technology inside the
University, and which might not be undone, but which might be unravelled through a critique
of the socio-technical systems in which those technologies are deployed (Facer & Sandford,
2010; Selwyn, 2010) offers a way of re-inscribing a different form of academic labour. This
description of the ravelled, tangled or complicated nature of academic work with technology
covers, but is not limited to, issues of: hardware and software procurement and renewal; data
management and mining, and learning analytics; curriculum planning and delivery;
assessment of and for learning; engagement with open education, massive on-line open
courses and personal learning environments; and strategies for mobile learning. However, it
also covers the mechanisms by which each of these threads of activity are themselves tangled
or stitched into the marketisation of an educational system that has traditionally been seen as
publically-funded, governed and regulated (McGettigan, 2012).
Therefore, by highlighting one of the tangled threads, in this case educational technology,
academics might be able to use that unravelled element to understand the neoliberal, capitalist
networks inside and against which the broader pattern of academic labour and the idea of the
University as a public good are realised (Ball, 2012; Deem et al., 2007; Neary, 2012a). One
result may be the ability to situate educational technology inside networks of power and

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counter-hegemonic resistance that enable academic labour to be reclaimed for socially-useful
activities. This is important because educational technology represents assemblages of
machinery, hardware, software and practices, which amplify the mechanisms through which
UK HE is being restructured. As a result it becomes a potential site of struggle between
labour and capital. From an Autonomist Marxist perspective, this offers the prospect of
unravelling the realities of academic labour, so that they might be re-stitched inside practices
that can then be dissolved into the fabric of society. This is important if academic labour is to
be engaged with solving problems at the level of society that are related to scarcity,
abundance, austerity, climate change, peak oil and so on, rather than being prescribed and
enclosed for the knowledge economy and for monetised outcomes. At issue are the ways in
which academic labour can be used for societal knowing, rather than the knowledge
economy.
The co-option of educational technology inside neoliberal discourse
If the relationships between academic labour and educational technology are to be fleshed
out, they need to be situated inside the dominant ideological practices that are impacting HE.
These practices have been described materially as neoliberalism (Harvey, 2005), and have
been identified in terms of the following principles (Klein, 2007), which apply to education
as a previously socialised good that is being privatised (Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS),
2010) in response to a structural economic crisis.
1. Structural re-adjustment through mechanisms that enforce competition and coercion,
enabled through both fee structures and student indenture, and the creation of a policy
space for the promotion of shared services and outsourcing.
2. The transfer of state or public assets to the private sector under the belief that it will
produce more efficient, smaller, and less regulatory government and improve
economic outputs, witnessed in policies to widen access to open or publically-funded
data and research in order to monetize them.
3. A lock-down of state subsidies for work, like arts and humanities in education, which
is regarded as inefficient.
4. The privatisation of state assets and enterprises in the name of consumer choice,
economic efficiency or sustainability, revealed in the outsourcing of educational
provision and the increased role of consultants and public/private partnerships.

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5. A refusal to run deficits, and hence justifying pejorative cuts to state services
including subsidized access to education.
6. Extending the financialisation of capital and the growth of consumer debt, through
increased student fees and the removal of grants.
7. A controlled, economically-driven, anti-humanist ideology, namely student-as-
consumer, and higher education-as-commodity.
For Newfield (2012) the implementation of these principles underpins state-subsidised
privatisation of publically-funded, regulated and governed assets (McGettigan, 2012), whilst
for Deem et al. (2008) it reflects the isomorphism that is occurring within and across
universities in the United Kingdom (UK), as an ideology of marketisation is insinuated into
the practices and policies that shape the whole higher education environment. This is not a
new process, but the pace with which it is now being rolled-out acts as a dislocation or shock
that enables change to be enforced through uncertainty. This is one of the ways in which
capital uses systemic crises to renew itself (Harvey, 2010; Marx, 2004), and it forms the
background layer upon which the enclosure of work inside the University takes place.
In the UK HE sector, this process of enclosure is made visible in: the re-catagorisation of
Universities as businesses in Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC) regulations on
taxation (2012); in the Coalition Government's use of Value-Added Taxation (VAT)
regulations to open-up a space for marketisation through shared or outsourced,
technologically-provided services (HM Treasury, 2012); and by enabling for-profit providers
to obtain the same VAT exemption on educational services as not for-profits (McGettigan,
2012). For McGettigan (2012) this enables private providers, which are able to leverage
private equity, to steal a march on the publically-funded and regulated section of the sector,
which being constituted as not for-profit, charitable corporations cannot access such funds.
This leaves those institutions at the whims of private, philanthropic donations, or needing to
chase increasingly limited and limiting research funding, the economic restrictions on which
threaten further forms of capitalist enclosure.
Enclosure is accelerated because the State, working as regulator rather than funder, acts for
the market. Lipman (2009) argues that this is a crucial field of contestation.

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Education markets are one facet of the neoliberal strategy to manage the structural crisis of
capitalism by opening the public sector to capital accumulation. The roughly $2.5 trillion
global market in education is a rich new arena for capital investment.
This underpins what Ball (2012) describes as the ‘neoliberal discourse’, which is designed to
promote shared libertarian, market-oriented entrepreneurialism that in-turn fosters a new
hegemonic relationship between capital and the State. In this model, networks of power and
affinity enable the re-production of new geographies of social relationships (Ball, 2012) that
focus on creating uncertainties in the spaces in which the State operates, telling common-
sense stories about the value of private enterprise in 'leveraging' both performance and cost
reduction, and in connecting those stories to a meta-narrative of there is no alternative. These
neoliberal, transnational activist networks (TANs) form transnational and shifting
assemblages of activity that consist of academics and think tanks, policy-makers and
administrators, finance capital and private equity funds, media corporations and publishers,
philanthropists and hedge-funds interested in corporate social responsibility. These TANs
aim at regulating the state for profit and the extraction of value, and they reinforce these
dominant positions through: lobbying; conferences; prizes; media attention; control of
funding; research programmes and outcomes; evidence-based approaches to data-laundering;
regulation; and technologies. Pace Harvey (2010), Ball (2012) describes the reality of how
TANs utilise technologies that amplify the complex geographies of neoliberalism, which are
resolved materially, as historically-specific concrete class struggle.
Against this backdrop of the enclosure and marketization of activity and relationships inside
the neoliberal university, educational technology is an important domain through which these
strategies play–out. This process is complex and is related to the ways in which some
educational functions prove profitable and can be privatised. For example, some vocational
training can be provided at low-cost using part-time or precariously employed, post-graduate
lecturers engaged with the resources of on-line open education or distance learning (Couvée,
2012). Publishers are able to leverage their market capitalisation and access to content and
learning management systems to sell services into education (Ravitch, 2012). Private equity
funds are engaged in the purchase and development of established learning management
systems and related educational applications, in order to sell services into tertiary education
(Gartner, 2011). Those activities that require much higher infrastructural investment, and
which are of marginal profitability but which have a higher social utility, like medicine, can

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be left to the State to fund. It is in post-education that these proprietary skills can be
harnessed for profit, for instance through the privatisation of healthcare.
Thus, technologies are insinuated inside a broader system of enclosure, which underpins
accumulation by dispossession (Harvey, 2010) as a way in which surplus academic labour or
rents can be extracted from individuals and institutions. In terms of surplus academic labour,
academic management is able to bypass agreements on contracted staff teaching hours by
moving more work on-line and then counting it as administration rather than formalised
contact hours with students. Equally, the development of discourses around innovation and
teaching excellence that are explicitly linked to work that is undertaken on-line catalyses a
competitive environment between individual staff, and this in-turn acts as a lever to extract
surplus labour. In this way, constant innovation can be normalised or routinized within the
administrative load of academic staff, and performance can be monitored and disciplined. In
terms of rents, for-profit technology providers are able to utilise and mine institutional data,
especially where services like learning management systems and widgets or plug-ins are
hosted for the institution, in order to develop and sell new services(Gartner, 2011). Such
services, often related to personalisation and workflow efficiencies, are driven by institutional
competitiveness in the HE market and the need to appear innovative and efficient in service
delivery, and they enable the extraction of profits from fees on products that are contracted
for.
Educational technology and the university as new model public service
As the University becomes a site of capital accumulation, and as a result a site for
entrepreneurial investment, it is important to recognise that it also remains a site for the
production of mass intellectuality, where knowledge claims can be legitimised and critiqued
(Marx, 1993; Virno, 2001). However, the tensions between hegemonic and counter-
hegemonic views of the idea of the University make it a site of struggle over the meaning and
purpose of academic labour. The use of technology by academics inside, against and beyond
the University amplifies the nature of this struggle, and academic labour is impacted by
dominant narratives that underpin material practices about: the ways in which technologies
are procured; the evidence that is used to inform their educational deployment; the money
that frames research and development with technologies; and the ways in which institutions

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define the relationship between sustainability and technology. At issue is whether it is
possible to develop a critique of technologically-mediated behaviours inside the University,
from the perspective of academic labour.
However, in the UK, organisations that support the implementation of educational
technologies inside the University have a reduced space for manoeuvre in the face of
austerity politics. Thus, the main regulatory body for English universities, the Higher
Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE, 2012) highlights the importance of
technological deployments for cost-reductions, business-process re-engineering and
efficiency gains, which themselves might underpin radical transformation of the university as
a ‘business’. HEFCE states that it works with key partners like the Joint Information and
Systems Committee (JISC) and the Higher Education Academy (HEA) in supporting
institutions in this technological transformation. The JISC’s Transitions Group (2012)
highlighted the importance of the Higher and Further Education sectors for economic growth,
and it explicitly connects and relates changes in these sectors that are ‘political, financial,
technological and competitive’. The changed fiscal landscape means that JISC must operate
within ‘stringent new financial realities’, in order that it is ’better geared to achieving a large
impact’, related to cost savings, value-for-money, value and impact, and organisational
efficiency and effectiveness. This legitimation of a discourse that connects technology-
mediated educational innovation to fiscal realities is also revealed in the HEA’s
organisational values (2012), which place the importance of value-for-money alongside
enhancing student learning and institutional innovation.
These new realities are reinforced in the Educause (2012) ‘Top-Ten IT Issues’, as defined by
educational managers in the USA. These issues focus upon realising the affordances for
educational technology on the University as a business, through operational efficiencies,
consumerization, large data and analytics, as well as developing key strategies related to
“bring your own device” and the use of the cloud. Thus, the organisational landscape against
which HE institutions are regulated and from which they are supported has been recalibrated
by economic shock in the name of new public management (Davies, 2011). New public
management is an important lens through which the increasingly privatised relationships
catalysed by the deployment of educational technology can be analysed. The then UK cabinet
minister John Denham (2006), argued that

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All public services have to be based on a diversity of independent providers who compete for
business in a market governed by Consumer choice. All across Whitehall, any policy option
now has to be dressed up as “choice”, “diversity”, and “contestablity”. These are the
hallmarks of the “new model public service”.
In developing the idea of such a new model public service, the 2012 UK Coalition
Government budget (HM Treasury, 2012) further tightened control of the technological
policy and practice of universities. It re-defined universities as working in the ‘business’ of
education; it applied VAT-exemption on shared services, which tend to be hosted or
outsourced, in order to treat ‘commercial universities… fairly’; and it created a research
investment fund that ‘will attract additional co-investment from the private sector’ in
technology-rich areas (McGettigan, 2012). Hence, technology has become a crack through
which private corporations can enter the publically-funded, governed and regulated education
sector, using public/private partnerships and outsourcing in service-delivery (Davies, 2011),
and a discourse of economic efficiency and productivity catalysed through technological
innovation (Gove, 2012). In this metaphor, technology forms a crack in publically-funded,
governed and regulated education, which can be widened in order to open-up spaces for
marketised services to enter, and then privatised, enclosed and commodified.
Thus, technology acts as a mechanism that reinforces political enclosure inside systems of
education, through techno-essentialism. Feenberg (1999, p. viii) argues that essentialist
discourses ‘[of] technology reduces everything to functions and raw materials’. Technology
is viewed as a lever for efficiency gains, innovation in productivity and work-flows, and in
delivering user or student-centred outcomes related to inclusion, participation, retention or
value-for-money. In this discourse, technology in education is deliberately cast in primarily
economic and de-politicised terms, and in a form that allows further recalibration of the
sector by alluding to deficits in the existing technological practices of teachers and
academics.
Educational technology and the recalibration of academic labour for business

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Inside neoliberal discourse and material practices, the University is re-defined based on the
idea of the new model public service. This idea frames the recalibration of academic labour
inside and across HE for business, catalysed by technological innovation. Thus, the UK’s
Secretary of State for Education, Michael Gove (2012), has linked the importance of
technology in leveraging educational change as follows:
with each new gadget, each huge leap forward, technology has expanded into new intellectual
and commercial fields… Almost every field of employment now depends on technology.
From radio, to television, computers and the internet, each new technological advance has
changed our world and changed us too. But there is one notable exception. Education has
barely changed. Our school system has not prepared children for this new world. Millions
have left school over the past decade without even the basics they need for a decent job. And
the current curriculum cannot prepare British students to work at the very forefront of
technological change.
Yet as Newfield (2010) argues in his work on the new proletarianisation, it is difficult to
sustain such a deterministic, positivist argument for the generalised, emancipatory potential
of technological skills, because under capitalism technologies are used: to promote
consumption; to lever production gains; to increase the rate of profit; for workplace
monitoring and surveillance, as well as management and stratification; to catalyse the
creation of value by opening up or harnessing new markets; or by stimulating innovations
that further valorise and re-produce capital (Fuchs, 2010; Valtysson, 2011). As a result of
these processes, Newfield (2010, pp. 13-14) highlights how the educational discourse inside
neoliberal capitalism works to produce three different types of technologically-driven
knowledge or skill.
1. Type C is ‘commodity skills’, which are ‘readily obtained’ and whose possessors are
interchangeable, like the skills associated with call centre operations.
2. Type B is ‘leveraged skills’, which require advanced education and which offer clear
added value to firms, and yet which are generally available. These include the skills of
computer programmers or network administrators, the proliferation of which depress
wages and leads to automation or outsourcing.
3. Type A consists of ‘proprietary skills’, defined as ‘the company-specific talents around
which an organization builds a business’. The holders of these skills are nurtured and
cultivated in order to contribute to the firm’s propriety knowledge, and to discipline or
cheapen the other two types of knowledge worker. In this view, only those who create

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proprietary knowledge, thereby enabling the firm to seek rents, are to be retained,
supported, cultivated, and lavishly paid.
In light of this typology, Gove (2012) re-enforces the entrenched view that alleges the
democratic-yet-neutral tendencies of digital technology, where all have the opportunity to
profit from becoming the Type A workers that Newfield analyses. In this view, it is by
harnessing technology, coupled to a process of re-skilling teachers and academics, and
deploying these techniques inside new curricula that are fit for business, entrepreneurship and
creativity, that economic equality of opportunity will be enabled. Thus, Gove (2012) stated
that:
technology will bring more autonomy to each of us here in this room. This is a huge
opportunity. But it's also a responsibility. [So] We want to focus on training teachers.
Universities, businesses and others will have the opportunity to devise new courses and
exams. In particular, we want to see universities and businesses create new high quality
Computer Science GCSEs, and develop curricula encouraging schools to make use of the
brilliant Computer Science content available on the web.
Using technology as a cipher for opening-up education for business imperatives, amounts to a
form of what Newfield (2012) calls ‘subsidy capitalism’, in which ‘the public, directly or
indirectly, does not participate in the investment, research, and development decisions that
remake society year in and year out. It hands over resources and all decision rights at the
same time.’ The new public management focus on business defining the curriculum, and by
association recalibrating teacher or academic training and development, reflects Newfield’s
(2012) point for the USA that:
There is a profound cultural limitation at work here: American leaders see the agencies
responsible for social benefits as categorically less insightful than the financially self-
interested private sector, even though the latter are focused entirely on their own advantage.
As it is now, the future emerges in erratic bursts from the secret development operations at
companies like Google... We are having an increasingly difficult time imagining a collective
future that emerges from common activity.
It is from inside the increasingly constricted, technologically-mediated and determined spaces
that form the University and shape its curricula, that academic labour might be re-thought.

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Educational technology and the enclosure of academic labour inside the university
In imagining a collective future that emerges from common activity underpinned by
technology, educators might usefully focus less on the perceived affordances of educational
technology, in terms of participation and digital literacies, horizontal organisational
structures, equality of access and opportunity (JISC, 2012), and focus more on the
implications of the uses of technology for academic labour related to increased service-sector
proletarianisation and monitoring, and the routinisation of work that is based on outcomes
and technologically-mediated performance (Feenberg, 1999; Williams, 2010; Caffentzis,
2012). This change of focus is important because academic labour inside the university is
increasingly set against what Mason (2012) highlights as a new sociological type, the
disenfranchised graduate loaded with debt and with no future beyond precarious employment
and the obligations of debt repayment that in-turn threaten intergenerational justice (The
Intergenerational Foundation (IF), 2012).
Not only are these relationships framed by debt, but they are also impacted by the domination
of corporate power over digital lives, spaces and time, which are individual and communal,
as well as being social and academic. Doctorow (2012) highlights how the information
economy is being realised through the subsumption of our everyday engagements with
technology and digitised content under private property and copyright law. Thus, labour is
reduced to ‘a tedious enumeration of every permutation of things people do with
information—and what might be charged for each.’ The result of this commodification of our
virtual lives is a need to ‘control how people use their computers and the files we transfer to
them.’ Doctorow (2012) highlights how surveillance and monitoring on software, firmware,
and hardware enables corporations and the State to restrict and control the operation of
personal technologies. Moreover, network technologies are routinely used to overcome on-
line anonymity tools like DNSSec and Tor, in the name of monitoring copyright and piracy
infringements.
This is the deeply politicised and increasingly enclosed world onto which educational
technology and academic labour needs to be mapped, beyond simple economic utility. It is
from inside this enclosed space that educational technology is interpreted and implemented
by educational technologists, staff developers and technicians, and then adopted by
practitioners and students. In taking a more meaningful stance, Feenberg (1999, p. 87) argues

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for ‘[a] critical theory of technology [that] can uncover that horizon, demystify the illusion of
technical necessity, and expose the relativity of the prevailing technical choices’. At issue is
reclaiming a politics of technology in education, against a determinist or essentialist position.
It is important, therefore, to develop examples of how technology impacts academic labour
based on problems of performance, efficiency and scale, and to highlight how a broader,
political, contextual analysis might be developed. In the sections that follow this is begun
based on a revelation of the relationships between academic labour and: cloud computing;
learning management systems; corporate publishers like Pearson; surveillance and
monitoring technologies; and technologies that emerge from the militarisation of the
university.
Cloud computing and the control of academic labour
Cloud Computing has been argued for from perspectives of scale and organisational/labour
efficiency (IBM, 2010). However, economic and service-level analyses provide a limited
critique of the geo-political and legal issues that arise, in particular related to the conflicts
between free speech and national security legislation, like the US Patriot Act (Electronic
Frontier Foundation (EFF), 2012; Hall and Winn, 2011). These conflicts act as a brake on the
freedom of academic research, and enclose the processes and data produced through
academic work inside the politics of security. Thus, the EFF (2012) notes that
The issue for users is whether the US has jurisdiction over the cloud computing service they
use, and whether the cloud computing service has “possession, custody or control” of their
data, wherever it rests physically… anyone using cloud hosting that is concerned about
government access has to decide which governments they are most concerned about accessing
their data and records and choose their provider accordingly.
This is important where research or teaching covers sensitive subject-areas, like terrorism, as
there are examples of university management taking an authoritarian line and working with
authorities against academic autonomy (Yezza, 2011). It is also important where decisions
about implementing outsourced solutions are taken for bureaucratic reasons rather than being
based on the practices of academics (Pritchard, 2011). This reflects the disconnection
between the organisational drivers for economic efficiency and academic needs to ensure the
safety of data and practices.

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The Educause (2012) list of ‘Top-Ten IT Issues’ places the development of a cloud strategy
alongside: ‘supporting the trend for IT consumerization’; improving the institution’s
operational efficiency’; ‘integrating information technology into institutional decision-
making’; ‘transforming the institution’s business using information technology’; and the use
of large data and learning analytics to manage the institution strategically. These strategic
issues are inter-connected, to the extent that storing digital artefacts in the cloud enables the
outcomes of academic labour to be mined and monitored, for example in storage spaces like
dropbox or social networks like Facebook, and for new services to be monetised from them
(Hall and Stahl, 2012). Cloud-based services also enable the separation and surveillance of
proletarianised work, and the re-production and redistribution of commodity- and leveraged-
skills to low-wage societies through outsourcing, and cutting labour costs for in-house work.
There are also attempts being made to commodify and sell the idea of cloud computing in
terms of green IT or sustainability (IBM, 2010), despite the lack of evidence that the cloud is
‘greener’, with industry wrapping itself around this concept as a space for further service-led
innovation, and for the privatization of public, academic services through outsourcing,
consultancy or the extraction of rents. Thus, cloud-based hosting of the processes and data
that underpin academic labour becomes a way in which rents can be extracted from that
labour.
The relationship between learning management systems, private equity and academic
labour
Blackboard (2012) is utilised as a Learning Management System in particular across the
global North, and, as with other providers in the marketplace, the Company provides services
that are rented by or licensed to Universities that are funded in some cases by the State
through general taxation. Blackboard also has a stake in selling value-added services into
universities, including some that are cloud-based. In 2011 it was reported that Blackboard
had an ‘expanding footprint in the defense sector’, and that as a result
The Pentagon gets a manageable software program that helps instructors in subjects like
military logistics and infantry tactics get a handle on the coursework flow of thousands of
occasionally far-flung active duty military personnel. Blackboard, on the other hand, has a
neat little honeypot that has, in many ways, saved the company (The Financial Investigator,
2011).

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The argument here was that defence contracts made the learning management system as a
product viable. Also in 2011 Blackboard was acquired by Providence Equity Partners, a
private-equity company. Providence was advised by, amongst others Goldman Sachs, on its
acquisition of SRA International (2011), a company that ‘is dedicated to solving complex
problems of global significance for government organizations serving the national security,
civil government, health, and intelligence and space markets.’
At issue here is not the ethics of the relationships between these corporate bodies. However,
the relationships between publically-funded and regulated universities, many of whom have
corporate forms that are charitable and not-for-profit, and companies like Blackboard,
enmesh academic labour deeply within Ball’s (2012) TANs. These educational networks
include investment banks and private equity companies, defence contractors and the
Pentagon, and service providers who are tied into issues of national security and
militarisation. The role of academics and their labour inside these networks, which enable
those networks to leverage rents and profits through joint ventures and service delivery, needs
to be discussed in the context of a University’s mission and in the sector’s wider aims to
work for the public good, rather than simply addressing service-utility.
Pearson and the privatisation of academic labour
The formation of Pearson College (2012) enables the education corporation Pearson
Education Inc. to leverage: its learning management system and on-line content produced by
academic labour; the partnerships that it has with established academic institutions in the UK,
like the University of Sunderland and Royal Holloway College (Gill, 2011); and, its
connected educational think-tank (2012). For Pearson Education, the rationale is to gain fees
from an HE market. The possibility that for-profit providers like Pearson College might gain
UK degree-awarding powers was signalled in the UK Coalition Government’s response to its
white paper consultation, which noted a desire to enable greater diversity and competition by
widening access to University Title (McGettigan, 2012). This, then, destabilises traditional
descriptions of academic labour inside universities that is publically-funded, regulated and
governed.

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The mapping of academic labour onto new terrains opened-up by Pearson College, is also
tied to the possibility that the accreditation or examination process might be commodified.
Pearson Education runs a for-profit examination board, Edexcel and this underpins the idea of
accreditation for-profit, which is also developing elsewhere in terms of massive on-line open
courses like Coursera (2012). Here there is a separation of the teaching process from that of
examination or of assessment for learning, and the commodification and enclosure of each
process. Ravitch (2012) has written critically about the role of Pearson in the privatisation
and monetisation of public education in the USA, stating that ‘tests are the linchpin of the
attack on public education. The politicians throw about test scores as evidence that our entire
public education system is a failed enterprise.’
This has ramifications for academic labour inside a more competitive UK HE market, as the
government uses secondary legislation to lever open the sector for privatization. As for-profit
providers are encouraged into the sector often using the promises of study at a distance using
technology as a catalyst, an architecture is opened-up that threatens the public regulation and
governance of HE. The profitability of HE partnerships for companies like Pearson Education
highlights how educational technology is developed as a way-in both to the extraction of
value from universities, and to the recalibration of the purpose of universities to catalyse such
extraction further. Partnerships and leverage are enforced, in-part, because academic labour is
shackled inside the demands of performativity revealed in the research evaluations or student
satisfaction scores. Thus, engaging with external partners like Pearson for service-driven
efficiencies make sense for universities that are being recalibrated as businesses.
Moreover, Pearson College signals the possibility that a surfeit of new, for-profit providers
will cheapen the costs of academic labour that does not develop proprietary knowledge or
skills (Newfield, 2010). This risks driving down labour costs and increasing precarious
academic work based on post-graduate rather than tenured staff. Flexibility, redundancy,
productivity, privatisation, restructuring, value-for-money, all underpinned by technology,
risk becoming the new normal for academics involved in teaching and research. As the
discipline of the market enters HE in the guise of for-profit, technologically-rich operations
like Pearson College, the spaces that are available to develop critiques of the recalibration of
the University are reduced.

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The use of institutionalised tools for the marginalisation and surveillance of academic
labour
The implementation of institutionalised communications-solutions, for instance Microsoft
Lync across universities often underpins an integrated systems architecture that connects
communications and information-management capabilities across an institution. However,
the development of such architectures also makes possible institutional surveillance of
academic practices and labour, through the recording of activity like logging-in to the system,
and settings related to personal availability in the system. It also enables the disciplining of
marginalised practices, like the utilisation of open source solutions like Linux, or of practices
that are defined outside technocratic norms, where those marginalised practices do not easily
inter-operate with the established communication tools (O’Rourke, Teicher, & Pyman, 2011).
So where staff utilise non-institutionally-agreed tools in their work, this can be viewed as
abnormal and as activity to be re-engineered.
This process of re-engineering is driven further by institutional demands for self-surveillance
and monitoring. Thus, the fetishisation of learning analytics and data-mining, linked to
diagnostic and summative assessment, alongside student progression and retention agendas,
is in-part technologically-driven, and connects academics to the daily measurement of their
practices and to impact measures for teaching (Siemens, 2012). For Siemens (2012, p. 1)
learning analytics offers
a substantial base of techniques for analyzing discourse, social networks, sentiments,
predictive models, and in semantic content (i.e., “intelligent” curriculum). In spite of the
currently limited knowledge exchange and dialogue between researchers, vendors, and
practitioners, existing learning analytics implementations indicate significant potential for
generating novel insight into learning and vital educational practices.
At issue is how these data are used to manage risk and performance in teaching and research,
and to commodify the outcomes and processes that underpin academic performance.
Connected to indicators of student satisfaction, like the UK National Student Survey and
returns on indicators like employability and retention to regulatory agencies, learning
analytics threaten the surveillance and monitoring of academic practices in ways imagined in
the cybernetic hypothesis (Tiqqun, 2001). In this hypothesis, technologies are utilised inside
networks of power, in order to dominate and commodify autonomy of action. Thus

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technologies and techniques of data-mining and analysis are used to destroy academic
autonomy.
“Autonomy” means that we make the worlds that we are grow. The Empire, armed with
cybernetics, insists on autonomy for it alone, as the unitary system of the totality: it is thus
forced to annihilate all autonomy whenever it is heterogeneous. We say that autonomy is for
everyone and that the fight for autonomy has to be amplified. The present form taken on by
the civil war is above all a fight against the monopoly on autonomy. (Tiqqun, 2001)
In developing approaches to the analysis of interactions mediated digitally, educational
developers or technologists, or academic staff might consider the means by which their
everyday existence is captured and incorporated inside the means of re-production of capital.
In engaging with metrics and the monitoring of outcomes, academics might consider how
these uses of technology risks further objectifying social relationships as commodities from
which value can be extracted through, for instance, the monitoring and harvesting of personal
data, the enclosure and control of spaces or applications of consumption, the use of venture
capitalism to support specific social networks, and the technological augmentation and
capture of affectivity. This is summed up by Watters (2012) in analysing the possible
acquisition of the school-focused social network, Edmodo by Pearson Education:
Pearson (via Learn Capital) was an early investor in Edmodo, and Edmodo could provide a
social network for the education publishing giant (and a giant that’s really scrambling to
move towards a digital future). Pearson products and services could be easily sold to
schools, teachers and students this way. Analytics could be gleaned about curriculum usage,
student-teacher engagement, and so on. A sale to Pearson would likely be about acquiring a
large user-base for additional curriculum and textbook sales. And, of course, it would be
about student and teacher data – what people are studying, buying, reading, writing.
Framing discussions about the implementation of specific technologies as politically-neutral
instances of problem-solving removes the imperative, for instance, to engage with labour
unions about the management and monitoring capabilities of such tools as an aggregated
whole. Thus, it becomes critical that the use of institutionally-deployed technologies is set
within a wider set of collective agreements that safeguard academic autonomy, rather than
seeking to control and exploit it. These relate to workload and work-based monitoring, as
well as health and safety. At issue is how academics or educational technologists discuss
labour rights and safeguards when deploying a technology or designing an architecture.

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Technologies And The Militarisation Of The University
In their review of militarism and education normal, Meiners and Quinn (2011) analyse the
mechanisms by which public education in the United States is shaped by militarisation. In
terms of HE this includes using the vast revenues devolved to the military for research, and
they argue that ‘[M]ilitarization, according to researchers, asymmetrically shapes
contemporary higher education, channelling resources to sub-fields within science,
engineering, mathematics, and particular areas of linguistic and political inquiry, while the
remaining disciplines—art and humanities, in particular—receive no military dollars.’
The interaction between the military and HE as revealed and catalysed through technology is
not new. Dyer Witheford and de Peuter (2009) argued in Games of Empire that the
production of games like America's Army and the development of augmented/virtual spaces
in partnerships between the military and university knowledge labs enables capital to
leverage the power of the state to ‘reassert, rehearse and reinforce [the] twin vital
subjectivities of worker-consumer and soldier-citizen’. With a focus on the marketing of the
game Full Spectrum Warrior, they highlight how curricula designed around the cultures of
game production, as well as the processes of modding and hacking demand ‘the total
obedience of the culture industry to the protocols of the War on Terror – its immediate
ingestion and reproduction of the state’s paranoias’, and that ‘new kinds of militarized
formats’ fuse ‘technological innovation and the erotic charge of combat’ in ‘renewed,
compulsive militarization’ (Dyer Witheford and de Peuter, 2009, pp. 101, 117). Here
academic labour is used to collapse the space between the military frontline and the living
room through research and development, and pedagogies of control.
Academic labour and educational innovation that is underpinned by technologies is folded
further inside this militarised discourse in a number of other narratives, beyond the
connections between the Pentagon and both Blackboard and Pearson noted above. These
include:
 the control and exploitation of hacking as labour through the relationships between
DARPA, hackerspaces and schools (O’Reilly About, 2012);

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 the connections between hacking competitions, education departments and national
security, and the co-option of hacking as a pedagogy of, or curriculum for, control
(Roberts, 2012);
 the use made by Universities of drone technology, and the co-option of academic research
for defense contractors (Morley, 2012);
 in public/private partnerships that focus upon wireless video surveillance of individuals
and activities(CISOC, 2012); and
 in the disconnect between our activist promotion of technologies that are apparently
transformative in the global North at the expense of their implication in war in the global
South, like the Raspberry Pi (Hall, 2012).
Academics might usefully ask fundamental questions about the ways in which their
educational spaces and the technologies they actively deploy inside them, contribute to the
militarisation of the physical spaces of their campuses, or the co-option of their labour for the
military. At issue is the possibility of creating non-militarised spaces. Hersch (2010) argues
that this is important because by diverting resources from other areas, military research both
distorts the research climate and balance between different subjects and reduces the resources
available for creative holistic approaches to conflict resolution. Moreover, the resources
associated with military research and the associated research climate may be impeding
genuinely creative and innovative research, which often takes place at the boundaries. The
disciplining of marginal forms of academic labour extends to the increasing homogenisation
of campus-based or institutional technologies through partnerships, and the refusal to support
marginalised innovations, often located in open source communities.
Reclaiming academic labour through a critique of educational technology
Enclosing academic labour inside the University is a new front in the attempt by capital to
further accumulation and the extraction of value. Inside UK HE, technology reveals the
conjuncture of forces that seek to catalyse and co-opt this process, in the services, techniques
and applications that blind us to the social and economic realities described by neoliberalism.
In the face of such co-option, academics might echo Lady Macbeth’s lamentation that
‘What’s done cannot be undone’. However, in that same moment technology enables
academics and educational technologists to shine a light on what their labour might be for.
What it might help them to defend, against its use for labour management, business-process

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re-engineering or the real subsumption of that labour for the valorisation of capital or for
control.5
The academic uses of technology might usefully then be developed critically,
tactically and in public, where the politics of how technologies are used as a crack for
surveillance, commodification and control can be analysed.
Thus, the interplay between the idea of doing as a deliberative action in the world that is with
regard and the roles of technology or technique has implications for academic labour as
capitalist work. The question is how academic labour can be used to subvert, dissent from or
push-back against the contexts and realities outlined above, either inside or beyond the
University. This involves academics imagining a collective future that emerges from common
activity, or in developing collective forms of work or doing that enables the development of
discretionary power and autonomy beyond the rate of profit. It is important that academics
use their labour to overcome the mechanisms that co-opt how that labour inside capitalism
overcomes all of human sociability, to the point where all activity appears to be determined
by economic growth. The point is whether academics can develop new forms of labour in
new spaces, in order that the complexity of their labour in HE might be unravelled and re-
stitched against technologically-enabled or determined, new public management.
However, even here there is a risk of replicating the systemic inequalities that are promoted
through hegemonic positions. As Hoofd (2010) argues, all forms of activism and innovation
risk their own subsumption inside structural regimes of domination. In fact
the current mode of [neo-liberal] late-capitalism relies on the continuous extension and
validation of the infrastructure and the optimistic discourses of the new information
technologies. Discourses that typically get repeated in favour of what I designate as the
emerging speed-elite are those of connection, instantaneity, liberation, transformation,
multiplicity and border crossing (Hoofd, 2010, p.9).
Thus, even those educators who claim to be hacking or co-creating ‘new spaces’ with
students, or developing and deploying personal learning environments or massive online open
courses as opposed to institutionalised systems, are operating inside structures that were
created with the goal of facilitating global capitalism and which contribute to refining
technologies of surveillance and control. Thus, Hoofd (2010, p. 17) argues that ‘The idea that
subjectivities from social movements are in any way less produced by neo-liberal

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globalisation is highly problematic.’ This stretches to cover the academic labour developed
inside social movements like Occupy or in marginalised groups like Anonymous and LulzSec
(Colman, 2012), or in the collective educational opposition realised in the EduFactory (2012).
However, these counter-hegemonic networks frame a desire for academic labour to be based
upon democratic engagements in general assemblies, in developing militant research
strategies against their control by capitalist agendas, and by doing, working or labouring in
public.
In agitating for general assemblies, militant research strategies, and for labour or for doing in
public, academics might then work to identify possibilities for the use of technology that are
precluded by new public management. This might involve cracking, hacking or modding the
university, and doing so in public, to forge a new form of sociability or new spaces for higher
learning. This is important in the face of governmental funding, regulation and governance
that are constricted by TANs, and in particular by the compression and enclosure of time and
space wrought by technologically-transformed, finance capital (Harvey, 2010). It is natural
that those who work inside universities would escape into problem-solving tactics like 'social
inclusion' or ‘equality of opportunity’, which are liberal themes so often connected to
discourses that emerge around emergent or participative technologies. Academics then have
an important role in arguing against the conversion of intellectual activity into intellectual
capital and hence private property, catalysed through processes of virtualisation that are
driven by the commodification of research and teaching and the emergence of commercially-
viable, proprietary products that can be marketised. The capitalist processes of deskilling and
automation, fetishisation of products, and proletarianisation of labour are at the core of this
process.
This struggle is given life in the range of radical academic projects and occupations in the
UK, which are an attempt to re-inscribe higher education as higher learning dissolved into the
fabric of society (Hall and Stahl, 2012). In some cases these projects are working politically
to re-define issues of power. In most cases they see the institution of the school or the
university as symbolically vital to a societal transformation. They form a process of re-
imagination that risks fetishisation or reification of radical education, but which offers a
glimpse of a different process that shines a light on the University as one node in a global
web of social relations. These webs are immanent to those neoliberal TANs and form their

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own transnational activist networks. Developing these networks also focuses upon rethinking
in public the role of academic labour in society, facilitated through educational technologies
but realised in concrete experiences on solid ground.
Conclusion: ds106 as a concrete experience on solid ground
One example of what might be possible is ds106 (2012). This on-line community that
emerged from an academic course on digital story-telling at the University of Mary
Washington focuses on learning and teaching in public, via shared and collaborative
assignments, that can be produced, consumed, distributed and remixed. Beyond the
formalized curriculum and assignment schedule, content is produced publically and
assessments can be submitted by anyone. Assessments take the form of mixed media and are
rated by the community based on criteria linked to their complexity. This rating takes the
form of participative dialogue, facilitated by the expertise located in academic staff. In this
way it offers the possibility of developing practical, democratic alternatives in public that
might become socially-useful knowledge designed for the production of solutions to social
problems.
The process of production of an assignment is mapped alongside the actual media artifact that
tells the digital story. In parallel to the course, a series of blogs and other community media
like a radio station help to make the community and community solutions more concrete.
Students laboring in public, inside an autonomous community, define the tools and
techniques they need to tell their digital story. One core idea underpinning ds106 is in the
relationships that might be formed and nurtured over time, reinforced creatively using a range
of digital media (radio, video, text), and realized in shared programming and a desire to keep
the virtual and physical spaces moving and reflective. This sustains ds106 as a communal or
social idea, and these communal actions in the ds106 world underpin individual formations,
integrations and perspectives.
This is important where academic labour might be used for societal transformation and
resilience, rather than for commodification inside the knowledge economy. Key here is
producing a knowing society based on the foundations of resilience, namely: the modularity

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of communities; the diversity of available resources; and feedback on activities undertaken in
those communities and with those resources, in order to enable a community to overcome or
adapt to a dislocation or shock. In enabling academic labour to flourish through technologies
and against commodification, promoting public activity for resilient solutions to complex
problems inside the fabric of society is critical (Hall and Winn, 2011).
Thus, ds106 asks academics need to consider their participatory traditions and positions, and
how they actively contribute to the dissolution of their expertise as a commodity, in order to
support other socially-constructed forms of production. In the critique of knowledge
production, revealed through the production/consumption of specific educational
technologies, ds106 is an example of how the University might grow in excess of its
symbolic role. Thus, students and teachers might reconsider how they engage with digital
technologies, in order to contribute to a re-formation of their webs of social interaction.
Critically it acts against enclosure for work or doing in public, using a range of technologies.
It also strives to find other forms of value, beyond monetisation. In this way, ds106 asks us to
question how do students and teachers critique educational technologies in order contribute to
public dissent against marketisation, domination and foreclosure, and to tell stories
democratically and in public?
This public role matters more because academic labour is being commodified in a world that
faces socio-environmental crises, and which is in the midst of a global crisis of capitalism.
The agenda for the development of digital literacies, or for an ICT curriculum, or for
redesigning academic training, lies beyond the demands of transnational finance capital or of
commerce or of industry, as realised by the state-under-capitalism, for marketised skills.
Testing and deliberating global solutions demands an engagement with politics, and with
politics as they are revealed through technology. Overcoming global problems demands that
universities do not simply outsource solutions, but that they act as public spaces for the co-
operative and social use of technologies in the name of socially-useful knowledge. This is the
idea that students and teachers might dissolve the symbolic power of the University into their
actual, existing realities, in order to engage with a process of personal transformation that is
about more than employability (Neary, 2012b).

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At issue inside the increasingly marketised UK HE sector is how academics engage critically
with educational technologies in order to create spaces for the production and construction of
a mass intellect in commons that enables their labour to underpin a pedagogy of excess
(Neary & Hagyard, 2011). Inside the UK University as a new model public service, academic
might use technologies to refuse and push-back against the idea that the market and an
employability-fuelled education system is the motor for solving social problems. In this
process, it becomes more important that technologically-mediated, academic labour becomes
socially-defined and produced knowing. This might be achieved through work that is carried
out in public using a range of technologies and techniques that engage with uncertainty across
a wider cohort of disciplines. Engaging academic labour in developing resilient approaches to
global disruptions demands no less.
1
Where the struggle between labour and capital lies in the creation and commodification of cognitive capital,
for example inside the University as a vehicle for what has been termed the “knowledge economy”, production,
consumption and circulation processes have been defined as “immaterial” (Hardt and Negri, 2000; Žižek 2009).
In this view, the immaterial, individual emotions and affects, cultural cues and mores, and the construction of
the relations between individuals “are themselves the very material of our everyday exploitation” (Žižek 2009,
139). From this process of mutating human subjectivity, capital exerts control over communication and the re-
purposing of information, and uses techniques and technologies to enclose and commodify an increasingly fluid
and identity-driven set of social relations. One aim is to reduce unproductive circulation time, and thereby
increase the rate of profit and relative surplus value. It should be noted that the idea of immateriality, tied to the
ideas of the social factory, precarity, network governance and cognitive capitalism are contested (Davies, 2011).
2
Accumulation by dispossession as a form of primitive accumulation has recently been developed by David
Harvey (see, for instance, Harvey, 2010) and relates to the mechanisms through which a producer’s rights and
her/his agency or autonomy are plundered or enclosed. The use of legal frameworks, employment rights or
intellectual property rights, often by corporations, to enclose the use of content, techniques and technologies and
to remove those rights from their originators, is one form of such dispossession. One outcome is the extraction
of rents of the development and commodification of new services (Hall & Stahl, 2012). Thus, the relationships
between technologies, enclosure and dispossession inside the University are important in analysing academic
labour.
3
A starting point for a critique of the place of educational technology is socially necessary labour time, which
Marx (2004) viewed as the source of all value. Rather than being conceived of as units of labour measured in
hours or days, it is conceived as the amount of labour time required by a worker (or academic/student) of
average productivity (and therefore skill), working with tools (like educational technologies) of the average
productive potential, required to produce a given commodity (such as feedback on assessment or journal article).
Thus, in the higher education context more-skilled academics reduce the average time and increase productivity,
whilst unskilled academics contribute less social value. Revealing the uses of educational technology in terms of
increased productivity and reduced socially necessary labour time enables value to be seen as a complex social
relation, rather than a material practice, such as a given amount of human activity (like the number of class
contact hours) or an object that can be commodified (like a mobile application). Value is a relationship between
people organised into a society, and in our current, historical form that is abstract labour within capitalist work
(Postone, 1993).
4
The Autonomous Marxist position that developed from the Italian Autonomia Operaia movement of the 1970s
is important in this discussion as it develops an argument for labour as the on-going crisis of capital. As a
movement from below, it enables critiques of capitalist work, and especially the ideas of the social factory, mass
intellectuality and immateriality to be developed. It also creates a space inside which governance through, for
example, networks can be analysed from a range of perspectives, which include the waged and the unwaged.

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One outcome is the attempt to refuse or push back against the realities of capitalist work by describing world in
which “doing”, and an exodus from capitalist work, becomes central (Holloway, 2002). In this process of
refusal or pushing-back, understanding the co-option of technologies and techniques, including ensembles of
practices, is critical if counter-hegemonic positions are to be developed and deployed.
5
In higher education, as in society more broadly, it is through the repetition of technology and its automation of
creative tasks, that academic work becomes abstracted from the staff and students engaged in those practices.
This level of abstraction of the academic’s labour-power from the process and reality of capitalist work enables
social domination, which is impersonal, increasingly rationalized, and managerially constrained, and which adds
to a University’s relative surplus-value (Marx, 2004; Postone, 1993). More generally, social domination takes
the form of real subsumption of labour under capital, whereby the production and labour processes are revealed
as changes in the relationship of the worker to her/his own production and to capital. In the real subsumption of
labour under capital, the development of productive labour-power (including through technological innovation)
becomes large-scale or globalised, and incorporates science and machinery as representations of the general
intellect. In the Autonomist Marxist view, developing social critiques of the real subsumption of all of life under
capitalist work and the extraction of value, inside what has been called the social factory, is critical in
developing counter-hegemonic positions.
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Author Details
Dr Richard Hall is De Montfort University’s Head of Enhancing Learning
throughTechnology. He is a UK National Teaching Fellow and a Reader in Education and
Technology. Richard is a Research Associate in the Centre for Computing and Social
Responsibility at De Montfort University, and his research interests include: the idea of the
University and radical alternatives to it; technology and critical social theory; resilient
education and the place of co-operative practice in overcoming disruption in higher

Richard Hall
82 | P a g e
education; and the place of social media in the idea of the twenty-first century University. He
writes at: http://richard-hall.org
Correspondence
Corresponding address: Dr Richard Hall, De Montfort University, Leicester, UK.
Email: rhall1@dmu.ac.uk

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